Optics are not policies. India should stay the course on the Quad |
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Optics are not policies. India should stay the course on the Quad
India’s engagement with Quad is not a departure from strategic autonomy but an expression of it. In the era of multi-alignment, strategic autonomy means engaging different partners.
As New Delhi prepares to host the latest edition of the Quad foreign ministers’ meeting on 26 May, the absence of a leaders’ summit looms large. While the easiest conclusion may be that the Quad is experiencing an irreversible drift, such a reading would be tempting yet incomplete.
The optics are certainly less than ideal, but technical-level engagements and functional cooperation across several pillars have continued, keeping the strategic rationale and utility of the grouping intact, even if somewhat shaken.
Emerging literature on the Quad captures this ambiguity and uncertainty. While some emphasise how Washington’s economic coercion and limited strategic bandwidth have not made the functioning of the grouping any easier, others underscore the continued significance of such minilaterals amid shifting political attention caused by simultaneous regional wars and an increasingly fragmented global order. Both assessments contain elements of reality, but for India, the key takeaway is that the Quad’s relevance cannot be measured solely through the calendar of leadership summits or the vagaries of geopolitics.
The geopolitical backdrop is unmistakably messy, despite US Secretary of State Marco Rubio choosing to begin his first day in office with a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting in January 2025. However, the second Trump administration’s preoccupation with trade wars and crises elsewhere has emitted signals of diminishing attention toward the Indo-Pacific. The uneven agenda has certainly generated perceptions of strategic drift, but perceptions do not always translate into policy, and it would augur well for New Delhi to focus on the institutional web of linkages and functional areas of cooperation enabled under the aegis of the Quad.
Angels in the details
The last Quad leadership summit in 2024 in Wilmington, Delaware, described the Quad as........